The mental game

Setting the system up takes twenty minutes. Learning to leave it alone takes about two months, and it is the part most people find hardest. This page is about that part.

The deal you are making

The strategy earns, when it earns, from small statistical edges applied across roughly twenty positions, day after day. Edges like that only show up in the average of many days. Any single day, week, or even month is mostly noise, and no amount of watching changes that.

So the deal is: you give the system time, and in exchange you get to judge it on evidence that actually means something. Judge it on a fortnight and you are judging a coin flip.

Your first two months, honestly

Expect all of the following, in no particular order:

A losing streak of several days in a row. The track record contains losing streaks of ten days. Yours will not feel like a statistic when you are inside it.
A winning streak that feels like the system has hit its stride. It has not, any more than the losing streak meant it was broken.
At least one day that wipes out a week of gains, and at least one that pays for a losing week.
Long stretches where nothing much happens and checking daily gets boring. Boring is the system working.

None of this tells you whether the system is working. Two months in, the honest answer to “how is it going?” is usually still “too early to say from returns alone”.

The two mistakes that actually cost money

Watching anxiously costs you sleep. These cost you money:

Raising leverage after a good run. A winning streak feels like proof, and the natural response is to size up. Statistically, the good run told you almost nothing, so the decision has the same information behind it as sizing up on day one, except now it is emotionally easy, which is precisely the warning sign. If you intend to raise leverage, decide the schedule up front (for example, after three months, regardless of what those months looked like), not in reaction to a streak.

Pausing or unwinding during a drawdown. Stopping mid-drawdown locks in the loss, guarantees you miss whatever follows, and, practically, voids the 90-day guarantee, which requires the account to have stayed connected and running. If a drawdown is genuinely intolerable, the correct lever is lowering leverage, not the off switch, and the correct time to have picked your leverage was before you began.

The pattern behind both: acting on recent performance, in the direction recent performance points. It is the single most reliable way to underperform the very system you are paying for.

What to watch instead

Returns are the wrong dashboard for the first months. Process is the right one, and it is checkable from week one:

Runs are happening. One run per scheduled day on Trade history.
Exposure tracks target. Portfolio gross within a few percent of the target.
Net stays near zero. The book remains market-neutral.

If the process is healthy, the returns are whatever the market gave a healthy process, and the published track record with every drawdown in it is your best guide to the range of outcomes. If the process is broken, that is the thing to act on, immediately, whatever the P&L says. See Troubleshooting.

Check less often than you want to

Daily checking is fine for the first week while you confirm the setup works. After that, the useful frequency is roughly weekly, and the honest frequency for judging performance is monthly at most. The app deliberately refuses to annualise short windows for the same reason: a number computed from noise is not made meaningful by being on a dashboard.

Nothing intraday requires your attention, because nothing happens intraday. The system does not need you watching, and you will make better decisions if you are not.